This Is How You Share Games on PS4

In 2013, Sony handed a friend a disc on camera to prove ownership meant something. In 2026, Sony's own lawyers argued in court that it never did.

June 2013, two days before Sony's own E3 press conference, Microsoft told a room full of reporters that every Xbox One would need to check in online once a day, even for single-player games, and that lending a disc to a friend meant they'd had to be your friend for 30 days first. Sony didn't say a word about it on stage. Instead, PlayStation's own YouTube channel quietly posted a 21-second video: executive Shuhei Yoshida holds up a copy of Killzone: Shadow Fall. "This is how you share games on PS4," he says, and hands it to colleague Adam Boyes, who says "Thanks." That's the whole video. Boyes has said they filmed other takes, longer ones, and cut them all — a friend passing you a disc that just works needed no further pitch. More than a decade later it's still argued over on forums as one of the best pieces of marketing gaming has ever produced, for exactly that reason.

Sony stopped shipping PS5 with a standard disc drive this year, its own comms team calling it "a natural direction... as the general preference for digital media significantly outpaces physical discs." Fair enough, that part's just business. Three months later, four PlayStation customers sued Sony, saying the PlayStation Store never disclosed clearly enough that buying a digital game isn't the same as owning it. Sony's lawyers filed their response on August 21: "It is not plausible that reasonable consumers would believe that once they obtained a digital video game, they would be the exclusive owner of that game." Their evidence: two of the plaintiffs, Edward Heycock and Jason Mendoza, each separately bought Resident Evil Requiem full price, three weeks apart — Mendoza on February 14, Heycock on the 25th. Since two different people can each hold a license to the same game, the filing argues, neither one really owns it.

Read the other way, that's also Sony's own court filing confirming it sold the identical license to two different customers, three weeks apart, and is now citing the sale as a legal defense. Found via Aftermath.